As a brilliant person on the Internet wrote, “Friendzoning is bullshit because girls are not machines that you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.” This line wonderfully highlights the inherent sexism in friendzoning. That women should in any way be obligated to reciprocate sexual or romantic interest completely undermines the notion of women as autonomous people with the right to make their own decisions, and especially the right to make their own decisions about romantic relationships and sex.
(…) Beyond that, friendzoning suggests that all women are good for is sex. When a man laments the three years he wasted as a friend of a woman, only to be romantically rejected at the end of it all, he invalidates the idea that this woman might have any other worth beyond sex.